Rain City Guide

The Subprime Crisis is a broken promise to Joe “Sixpack”.
One Day in early 2006, Joe was feeling pretty darned good about himself. He was making $65,000 a year at a job he held for over 6 years. He had $30,000 saved up in the bank. He had no credit card debt. He owned his car free and clear. [...]

This announcement from IndyMac came via a press release today:
“…effective July 7, 2008, that we will no longer accept any new loan submissions or rate locks in our retail and wholesale forward mortgage lending channels, except for our servicing retention channel. We plan to honor all of our existing rate-locked loans and will continue to [...]

There’s a Washington State Mortgage Broker Commission meeting tomorrow, May 7th at the Renton Community Center to discuss the impact of State Senate Bill 6471. This legislation ammends the Consumer Loan Act and Mortgage Broker Practices Act requiring all lenders to become licensed under the Consumer Loan Act (except those licensed under RCW 63.14)

This [...]

The intersection of ethics and real estate meet again
As if WaMu didn’t have enough on its public relations plate, CNN Money reports:
Jeniffer Wertz, who is seeking unspecified damages, says WaMu stopped accepting her appraisals in mid-2007 a month after she reported that her local housing market in California was “declining.”
Evidently, Wertz claims that Washington [...]

Escrow is one of the toughest jobs in real estate, for a lot of different reasons. But, it is by far the most interesting from our experiences in that both Lynlee and I have sold (circa 1990) as licensee’s, bought and sold homes as homeowner’s and today as owners of an escrow company.
For example, [...]

Couldn’t the whole yield spread premium (YSP) debate with all the trimmings end with a simple solution such as allowing the broker to charge whatever they want? Let the free market sort it out. Certainly lenders would have to be on board and do away with incentives or change them somehow, [...]

Who will suffer most from all of this? Will the people who honored their commitments, and who valued and appreciated the chance the lender took on them, get hurt by all of the “reform”?
No one was more surprised than I, when I got the mortgage and closed on my home. In the end, [...]

This is my Ken Schrammie rant:

How is it that a perfectly capable buyer of a home with nearly 770 FICO scores is placed into a short term Interest Only Adjustable Rate Mortgage with a start rate of 7%– sold with a 3 yr pre-payment penalty?

How do you handle the situation in which same the borrower [...]

I’d like to open this thread up to a conversation on the health of the Seattle market…
but there is a catch. I will not allow it to dissolve into a conversation about racism, liberals, RCG, or faith. If you’d like to have a reasonable intellectual conversation, you are more than welcome to participate. If [...]

If you read no futher, here are two key things you should do when getting a mortgage:
1) Get a “Good Faith Estimate” in writing!
2) Get a “Good Faith Estimate” from at least one mortgage broker and one bank.
Now, for those of you who want some more information…
When looking to finance a home, there [...]